Thursday, December 25, 2014

The hybrid concept for an electric aircraft makes sense because the gasoline engine can recharge the batteries while its cruising after the electric motors provide the thrust for takeoff: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

The Boeing sponsored glider was retrofit with a gasoline engine and electric motor running in hybrid mode.

Friday, December 19, 2014

True 3-D chips build layer upon layer in the fab rather than just stack die. These researchers through in low-temperature nanotube processing to sandwich two RRAM layers between to layers of logic, with more to come: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

3-D chips from Stanford connect four layers with standard vias, with the bottom being standard CMOS, the top carbon-nanotube logic transistors, and the middle two layers of resistive random access memory (RRAM).

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Thin film superconductors could revolutionize computing with fast-as-light speed and ultra-cool operation, extending battery live of mobiles from days to weeks: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

Ultra-thin superconducting film of niobium and nitrogen shows individual atoms, a view that helped MIT discover a universal law of superconductivity.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Superconducting at up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit has been demonstrated at the U.S. National Accelerator Laboratory, but the catch to room temperature superconducing today is that it only lasts for pico-second pulses, but they hope to extend the time to DC: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times.

Laser causes oxygen atoms (red) to vibrate between layers of copper (blue) oxide that are just two molecules thick in a common high-temperature superconducting material known as YBCO in a way that
likely indicates superconductivity.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Colloidal quantum dots can be sprayed on nearly any surface to turn it into a solar cell according to an IBM backed laboratory in Candada and the University of Toronto: R. Colin Johnson @NetGenLog and EE Times

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

DeepDive is free and open-source software intelligence developed in the same DARPA program in which IBM participated while developing its Watson. Called DeepDive, the program has been made free and open-source which by its primary programmer, Christopher Re, at the University of Wisconsin.

DeepDive (grey) equalled or excelled the indexing tasks given a group of human experts.

Friday, December 05, 2014

In the illustration below you can see how artificial sentience is envisioned by Sentient--put thousands or even millions of CPUs to work using evolutionary learning on different segments of Big Data, then pick the best ones and repeat until sentience is achieved: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

One step beyond neural networks: Neural networks are good at learning to recognize particular patterns. The next step consists of evolutionary algorithms (EA), which use mutation to create pools of possible solutions on different servers, each of which ranks its pool of possible solutions. An evolutionary coordinator then compares the solutions and sends the best of the crop for validation against big data sets it has never seen.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

The world's smallest 2 million pixel (1920 x 1080) DLP Pico chipset can be built into ultra-compact applications -- from near-eye displays (think Google Glass), to heads-up displays, to augmented reality, to virtual reality, to gaming, to all sorts of tiny-projector applications, from ones built into what TI calls "screenless TVs" to even some smartphones.

By R. Colin Johnson

Lastest Book:

Cognitive computers—cognizers—aim to instill human-like intelligence into our smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices using microchips that emulate the human brain. Dubbed the “Future of Computing” by the NYTimes, one of the “Best Innovation Moments of 2011” by the Washington Post and one of “10 World Changing Ideas” in a Scientific American cover story “A Computer Chip that Thinks” this book reveals how neuroscience and computer science are merging in a new era of intelligent machines light-years beyond Apple's Siri, IBM's Watson.

About the Author:

Next-generation electronics and technology news stories published non-stop for 20+ years, R. Colin Johnson's unique perspective has prompted coverage of his articles in a diverse range of major media outlets--from the ultra-liberal National Public Radio (NPR) to the ultra-conservative Rush Limbaugh Show.